Category Archives: Leadership

Have you ever wondered how much money the top leaders of some of the world’s leading nations earn annually? Here’s a list of the most recent official data (as of September, 2016) of the yearly earnings of these world leaders.

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For few minutes imagine yourself as HR manager of a large corporate who needs you to appoint its CEO.

Company which is going through a rough patch due to past bad management looks upto you as HR manager to make a right choice. Incoming CEO will be hired on contract for 5 years & will have absolute charge. In case of bad selection, you as HR won’t be able to replace the CEO during the contract period of 5 years.

Below are the profile of probable candidates.

Candidate A : Is currently Head of one of its division. Has proven track record of progress, customer satisfaction, employee growth & leadership for the past 13 years. Has humble background & not related to anyone, joined as an office boy & worked his way up through hard-work & employee support. Thoroughly understands the working of company & is very popular amongst employees. Has clear ideas about how to run the company & follows it firmly which at times upsets select few people.

Candidate B : Immature, has no experience. Doesn’t take up any position, its either CEO or nothing and has been a CEO in waiting since long. This attitude comes from the fact that almost always someone from his family has been the CEO, including the outgoing CEO who run the company for the past 10 years with plenty of irregularities, mis-management & poor performance. Born with the silver spoon, with uber rich lifestyle, has little to no connect with ground realities. With childish foibles, usually take refuge/support from females within his family.

Candidate C : Another fresher, claimed to be extremely efficient, was hired as Head of one Unit but couldn’t cope up & resigned. During short stint as Unit Head, tried to appease the employees with generous perks. Despite non-performing at reasonably senior position, now wants to be CEO.

None Of The Above(NOTA) : In the event of you not able to decide on any of these three candidates, there will be internal leg pulling & eventually someone would self appoint himself as CEO which in most probability would be Candidate B or someone other then the above 3.

Despite being an ordinary employee, this corporate empowers you to be an HR Manager to choose your CEO for next 5 years.

Appoint the right CEO & let this corporate giant regain its top position once again.

With the appointment of Satya Nadella as chief executive officer, Microsoft has joined a growing club of multinational corporations run by Indian-born managers. The list includes Pepsi, Deutsche Bank, MasterCard, Adobe Systems, Diageo, London-traded consumer goods giant Reckitt Benckiser and semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries.

At first glance, the commonalities among Indian CEOs are not particularly informative. They’re all in their late 40s and early 50s, the age when a successful manager’s career can be expected to peak. All graduated from U.S. or U.K. universities in addition to their Indian schools — no surprise, since all of them were immigrants who needed a stepping stone into a new culture. Those of them who had management experience in India started out with global corporations, which is logical given that it would have been harder to make the leap to global prominence from one of the family-owned companies that comprise about two thirds of Indian businesses. At least three — Nadella, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and Prem Watsa, who runs Fairfax Financial, the would-be savior of Blackberry — went to the same public school in Hyderabad, which experienced a technological boom around the turn of the century that included the establishment of Microsoft’s first development center outside the U.S. By the time the boom developed, however, all three were long gone from their hometown.

In other ways, the executives’ backgrounds diverge significantly. They come from different parts of India — Jaipur, where Deutsche co-CEO Anshu Jain was born, is 1,300 miles away from Chennai, the birthplace of Pepsi’s Indra Nooyi. A few of the CEOs — Nooyi, Ajay Banga of Mastercard, Ivan Menezes of Diageo — went to the Indian Institutes of Management, business schools set up by the Indian government since the 1960s to create a local management elite. Most did not. Some, like Nooyi, Narayen, Benckiser’s Rakesh Kapoor and Nadella, studied engineering. Others, like Jain, Menezes and MasterCard chief Ajay Banga, are economics and business graduates.

Yet there must be a reason why so many Indians, and not, say, Brazilians, Russians or Chinese, have made stellar corporate careers. The answer might be found in studies of the Indian management culture.

According to research from St. Gallen University in Switzerland, Indian executives are inclined toward participative management and building meaningful relationships with subordinates. “The leadership style traditionally employed in India fostered an emotional bond between superiors and subordinates,” the 2004 study said. “The feeling that the company genuinely cares for its employees, provided a strong bond of loyalty that went beyond financial rewards.”

In the “Indian club,” there are no executives known for a dictatorial management style. Nooyi says: “You need to look at the employee and say, ‘I value you as a person. I know that you have a life beyond PepsiCo, and I’m going to respect you for your entire life, not just treat you as employee number 4,567.'”

When Nadella replaced Steve Ballmer at the helm of Microsoft, his high standing with the company’s rank-and-file was cited as a major reason for his promotion.

A 2007 study by researchers at Southern New Hampshire University, which compared Indian managers to U.S. ones, found the South Asians more humble. It is not by chance that Nadella started his first e-mail to Microsoft employees as chief executive by saying, “This is a very humbling day for me.”

The study also found Indians to be particularly future-oriented, focused on long-term strategies. Narayen of Adobe says: “If you can connect all the dots between what you see today and where you want to go, then it’s probably not ambitious enough or aspirational enough”.

In his email, Nadella paraphrased an Oscar Wilde quote on the same point: “We need to believe in the impossible and remove the improbable.”

Perhaps most importantly, the Indian managers get to the top because they persevere. Most of those I mentioned had the patience to rise through the ranks at their companies, learning their business thoroughly from every angle. Nooyi joined Pepsi in 1994, Jain took his first job at Deutsche Bank a year later, Menezes has been with Diageo since 1997, Narayen was hired by Adobe in 1998, and Nadella’s appointment crowns a 22-year career with Microsoft.

There is nothing specifically Indian about empathy, humility, patience and an ability to dream. Yet it is these qualities that appear to have created the “Indian club” of overachievers in global business.